Undernews For May 16, 2008

Better one Wright
wing-nut than a whole party full of right-wing nuts. -
Sam Smith

PAGE ONE MUST

SO YOU WANT TO TALK
ABOUT APPEASING HITLER?

GUARDIAN, UK, 2004 Rumors of a link
between the US first family and the Nazi war machine have
circulated for decades. Now the Guardian can reveal how
repercussions of events that culminated in action under the
Trading with the Enemy Act are still being felt by today's
president

George Bush's grandfather, the late US senator
Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies
that profited from their involvement with the financial
backers of Nazi Germany.

The Guardian has obtained
confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National
Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director
was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.

His
business dealings, which continued until his company's
assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy
Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for
damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by
two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of
pre-election controversy.

The evidence has also prompted
one former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor to argue that the
late senator's action should have been grounds for
prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy. . .

While there is no suggestion that Prescott Bush was
sympathetic to the Nazi cause, the documents reveal that the
firm he worked for, Brown Brothers Harriman, acted as a US
base for the German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, who helped
finance Hitler in the 1930s before falling out with him at
the end of the decade. The Guardian has seen evidence that
shows Bush was the director of the New York-based Union
Banking Corporation that represented Thyssen's US interests
and he continued to work for the bank after America entered
the war.

Bush was also on the board of at least one of the
companies that formed part of a multinational network of
front companies to allow Thyssen to move assets around the
world.

Thyssen owned the largest steel and coal company in
Germany and grew rich from Hitler's efforts to re-arm
between the two world wars. One of the pillars in Thyssen's
international corporate web, UBC, worked exclusively for,
and was owned by, a Thyssen-controlled bank in the
Netherlands. More tantalising are Bush's links to the
Consolidated Silesian Steel Company, based in mineral rich
Silesia on the German-Polish border. During the war, the
company made use of Nazi slave labour from the concentration
camps, including Auschwitz. The ownership of CSSC changed
hands several times in the 1930s, but documents from the US
National Archive declassified last year link Bush to CSSC,
although it is not clear if he and UBC were still involved
in the company when Thyssen's American assets were seized in
1942.

Three sets of archives spell out Prescott Bush's
involvement. All three are readily available, thanks to the
efficient US archive system and a helpful and dedicated
staff at both the Library of Congress in Washington and the
National Archives at the University of Maryland.

The first
set of files, the Harriman papers in the Library of
Congress, show that Prescott Bush was a director and
shareholder of a number of companies involved with
Thyssen.

The second set of papers, which are in the
National Archives, are contained in vesting order number 248
which records the seizure of the company assets. What these
files show is that on October 20 1942 the alien property
custodian seized the assets of the UBC, of which Prescott
Bush was a director. Having gone through the books of the
bank, further seizures were made against two affiliates, the
Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel
Equipment Corporation. By November, the Silesian-American
Company, another of Prescott Bush's ventures, had also been
seized.

The third set of documents, also at the National
Archives, are contained in the files on IG Farben, who was
prosecuted for war crimes.

A report issued by the Office
of Alien Property Custodian in 1942 stated of the companies
that "since 1939, these (steel and mining) properties have
been in possession of and have been operated by the German
government and have undoubtedly been of considerable
assistance to that country's war effort".

Prescott Bush, a
6ft 4in charmer with a rich singing voice, was the founder
of the Bush political dynasty and was once considered a
potential presidential candidate himself. . .

In 1924,
his father-in-law, a well-known St Louis investment banker,
helped set him up in business in New York with Averill
Harriman, the wealthy son of railroad magnate E H Harriman
in New York, who had gone into banking.

One of the first
jobs Walker gave Bush was to manage UBC. Bush was a founding
member of the bank and the incorporation documents, which
list him as one of seven directors, show he owned one share
in UBC worth $125.

The bank was set up by Harriman and
Bush's father-in-law to provide a US bank for the Thyssens,
Germany's most powerful industrial family.

August Thyssen,
the founder of the dynasty had been a major contributor to
Germany's first world war effort and in the 1920s, he and
his sons Fritz and Heinrich established a network of
overseas banks and companies so their assets and money could
be whisked offshore if threatened again.

By the time Fritz
Thyssen inherited the business empire in 1926, Germany's
economic recovery was faltering. After hearing Adolf Hitler
speak, Thyssen became mesmerised by the young firebrand. He
joined the Nazi party in December 1931 and admits backing
Hitler in his autobiography, I Paid Hitler, when the
National Socialists were still a radical fringe party. He
stepped in several times to bail out the struggling party:
in 1928 Thyssen had bought the Barlow Palace on
Briennerstrasse, in Munich, which Hitler converted into the
Brown House, the headquarters of the Nazi party. The money
came from another Thyssen overseas institution, the Bank
voor Handel en Scheepvarrt in Rotterdam.

By the late
1930s, Brown Brothers Harriman, which claimed to be the
world's largest private investment bank, and UBC had bought
and shipped millions of dollars of gold, fuel, steel, coal
and US treasury bonds to Germany, both feeding and financing
Hitler's build-up to war.

Between 1931 and 1933 UBC bought
more than $8m worth of gold, of which $3m was shipped
abroad. According to documents seen by the Guardian, after
UBC was set up it transferred $2m to BBH accounts and
between 1924 and 1940 the assets of UBC hovered around $3m,
dropping to $1m only on a few occasions.

In 1941, Thyssen
fled Germany after falling out with Hitler but he was
captured in France and detained for the remainder of the
war.

There was nothing illegal in doing business with the
Thyssens throughout the 1930s and many of America's
best-known business names invested heavily in the German
economic recovery. However, everything changed after Germany
invaded Poland in 1939. Even then it could be argued that
BBH was within its rights continuing business relations with
the Thyssens until the end of 1941 as the US was still
technically neutral until the attack on Pearl Harbor. The
trouble started on July 30 1942 when the New York
Herald-Tribune ran an article entitled "Hitler's Angel Has
$3m in US Bank". UBC's huge gold purchases had raised
suspicions that the bank was in fact a "secret nest egg"
hidden in New York for Thyssen and other Nazi bigwigs. The
Alien Property Commission (APC) launched an
investigation.

There is no dispute over the fact that the
US government seized a string of assets controlled by BBH -
including UBC and SAC - in the autumn of 1942 under the
Trading with the Enemy act. What is in dispute is if
Harriman, Walker and Bush did more than own these companies
on paper. MORE

BUSH-HITLER TIMELINE

1924

WA
Harriman establishes Union Banking Corp. in partnership with
the German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, who will be a major
donor to the Nazi Party.

1930s

CONSORTIUM NEWS - Prescott Bush was a
fanatical opponent of Franklin D. Roosevelt. There were even
rumors that Bush tried to encourage a military coup against
Roosevelt after his election as President in 1933. But the
evidence - while intriguing - has never been
conclusive.

Similar secrecy and uncertainty surrounded the
intricate web of ownership and control of Harriman's Union
Banking Corp., which Prescott Bush administered in
collaboration with backers of Germany's Nazi Party.

As a
rising star at the Harriman firm, Prescott Bush became a
director (effectively in charge) of Harriman's UBC, which
had a financial relationship with German industrialist Fritz
Thyssen, an early supporter of Adolf Hitler.

Brown
Brothers Harriman supplied Thyssen with financing and other
banking services that allowed the Nazis to build up their
war machine. After Thyssen broke with Hitler in 1939,
Thyssen's banking empire came under control of the Nazi
government, with Prescott Bush continuing as a
behind-the-scenes force in the
relationship.

1937

Prescott Bush's investment firm sets
up deal for the Luftwaffe so it can obtain tetraethyl
lead.

1940s

NEW STATESMAN, APRIL 15, 2002 - In 1926,
Averill Harriman welcomed a familiar name into his Wall
Street firm (W A Harriman and Co) as senior partner -
Prescott Bush, father to one American president and
grandfather to another. The association was to end
simultaneously in fabulous wealth and temporary ignominy -
at the height of the Second World War, in 1942, the New York
Herald Tribune reported that the Union Banking Corporation,
of which Prescott Bush was a director and E Roland Harriman
a 99 per cent shareholder, was holding a small fortune under
the orders of Adolf Hitler's financier. Under the Trading
with the Enemy Act, all of Union Banking Corporation's
capital stock was seized.

INDYMEDIA, ISRAEL - On October
20, 1942, the U.S. government had had enough of Prescott
Bush and his Nazi business arrangements with Thyssen. Over
the summer, The New York Tribune had exposed Bush and
Thyssen, whom the Tribune dubbed "Hitler's Angel." When the
US government saw UBC's books, they found out that Bush's
bank and its shareholders "are held for the benefit of . .
members of the Thyssen family, [and] is property of
nationals . . of a designated enemy country." . . .

On
November 17, 1942, The US government also took over the
Silesian American Corporation, but did not prosecute Bush .
. . The companies were allowed to operate within the
Government Alien Property custodian office with a catch - no
aiding the Nazis. In 1943, while still owning his stock,
Prescott Bush resigned from UBC and even helped raise money
for dozens of war-related causes as chairman of the National
War Fund.

After the war, the Dutch government began
investigating the whereabouts of some jewelry of the Dutch
royal family that was stolen by the Nazis. They started
looking into books of the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart.
When they discovered the transaction papers of the Silesian
American Corporation, they began asking the bank manager
H.J. Kounhoven a lot of questions. Kouwenhoven was shocked
at the discovery and soon traveled to New York to inform
Prescott Bush. According to Dutch intelligence, Kouwenhoven
met with Prescott soon after Christmas, 1947. Two weeks
later, Kouwenhoven apparently died of a heart attack.

By
1948, Fritz Thyssen's life was in ruins. After being jailed
by the Nazis, he was jailed by the Allies and interrogated
extensively, but not completely, by US investigators.
Thyssen and Flick were ordered to pay reparations and served
time in prison for their atrocious crimes against humanity.
. .

When Thyssen died, the Alien Property Custodian
released the assets of the Union Banking Corporation to
Brown Brothers Harriman. The remaining stockholders cashed
in their stocks and quietly liquidated the rest of UBC's
blood money.

Prescott Bush received $1.5 million for his
share in UBC. That money enabled Bush to help his son,
George Herbert Walker Bush, to set up his first royalty
firm, Overby Development Company, that same year. It was
also helpful when Prescott Bush left the business world to
enter the public arena in 1952 with a successful senatorial
campaign in Connecticut. On October 8th, 1972, Prescott Bush
died of cancer. . .

In 1980, when George H.W. Bush was
elected vice president, he placed his father's family
inherence in a blind trust. The trust was managed by his old
friend and quail hunting partner, William "Stamps" Farish
III. Bush's choice of Farish to manage the family wealth is
quite revealing in that it demonstrates that the former
president might know exactly where some of his inheritance
originated. Farish's grandfather, William Farish Jr., on
March 25th, 1942, pleaded "no contest" to conspiring with
Nazi Germany while president of Standard Oil in New Jersey.
He was described by Senator Harry Truman in public of
approaching "treason" for profiting off the Nazi war
machine. Standard Oil, invested millions in IG Farben, who
opened a gasoline factory within Auschwitz in 1940. The
billions "Stamps" inherited had more blood on it then Bush,
so the paper trail of UBC stock would be safe during his 12
years in presidential politics.

[Investigative journalist
John] Loftus believes history will view Prescott Bush as
harshly as Thyssen. "It is bad enough that the Bush family
helped raise the money for Thyssen to give Hitler his start
in the 1920s, but giving aid and comfort to the enemy in
time of war is treason. The Bush bank helped the Thyssens
make the Nazi steel that killed Allied solders. As bad as
financing the Nazi war machine may seem, aiding and abetting
the Holocaust was worse. Thyssen's coal mines used Jewish
slaves as if they were disposable chemicals. There are six
million skeletons in the Thyssen family closet, and a myriad
of criminal and historical questions to be answered about
the Bush family's complicity."

[Because of Israeli
government suppression, this site is no longer
available]

SARASOTA HERALD TRIBUNE The president of
the Florida Holocaust Museum said Saturday that George W.
Bush's grandfather derived a portion of his personal fortune
through his affiliation with a Nazi-controlled bank. John
Loftus, a former prosecutor in the Justice Department's Nazi
War Crimes Unit, said his research found that Bush's
grandfather, Prescott Bush, was a principal in the Union
Banking Corp. in Manhattan in the late 1930s and the 1940s.
Leading Nazi industrialists secretly owned the bank at that
time, Loftus said, and were moving money into it through a
second bank in Holland even after the United States declared
war on Germany. The bank was liquidated in 1951, Loftus
said, and Bush's grandfather and great-grandfather received
$1.5 million from the bank as part of that dissolution . . .
Loftus pointed out that the Bush family would not be the
only American political dynasty to have ties to the "wrong
side of World War II." The Rockefellers had financial
connections to Nazi Germany, he said. Loftus also reminded
his audience that John F. Kennedy's father, an avowed
isolationist and former ambassador to Great Britain,
profited during the 1930s and '40s from Nazi stocks that he
owned. "No one today blames the Democrats because Jack
Kennedy's father bought Nazi stocks," Loftus said. Still, he
said, it is important to understand these historical
connections for what they tell us about politics today. The
World War II experience points out how easy it was then --
and remains today -- to hide money in multinational funds.
CONSORTIUM NEWS One of the
Bush-connected companies, Consolidated Silesian Steel, made
use of Nazi slave labor from concentration camps, including
Auschwitz. After Germany declared war on the United States,
the U.S. government investigated these relationships and
seized Harriman's UBC in 1943 under the Trading with the
Enemy Act. However, following the war, rather than face the
ignominy of profiting off his dealings with the Nazis, Bush
was compensated for the seizure of the bank, receiving a
$1.5 million settlement from the U.S. government, an
astonishing amount of money in 1945. .

SONGBIRDS DECLINE
IN NORTH AMERICA

BRITANICA BLOG All over North America,
populations of songbirds are declining. They have been doing
so for the last couple of decades, to an extent that is
alarming because, to make a poor play on words, songbirds
are the proverbial canaries in the great coal mine that is
the environment. The causes for the decline are imperfectly
understood, but, increasingly, scientists are seeing it as a
perfect storm of multiple causes.

Some of those causes are
on a global scale. Because of climate change, for instance,
there have been more hurricanes in the Atlantic basin, and
these have tended to be more intense than hurricanes of past
eras. Some scientists theorize that songbird populations in
eastern North America are in decline because, as the
songbirds migrate over open water, they are felled by
violent squalls. Literally millions of migratory birds that
cross the Gulf of Mexico are thereby at risk. Coastal
breeding grounds, migratory stopovers, and wintering grounds
are similarly threatened by rising sea levels. A recent
National Wildlife Federation report ventures that rising
temperatures and habitat loss mean that species such as the
blue-headed vireo and the purple finch may soon be absent
along the eastern seaboard.

Another cause of the decline
may be the global problem of mercury pollution, which has
increasingly turned up at high levels in songbirds under
autopsy. Today a full third of the lakes in the United
States are so polluted with mercury that warnings have been
issued against eating fish taken from them. One-half of that
mercury, it is estimated, comes from China, whose factories
and power plants release nearly 600 tons of it into the
atmosphere every year, along with 22.5 million tons of
sulfur and other pollutants. The International Energy Agency
predicts that China will account for more than a fifth of
the growth in world energy demand in the next 25 years and
for more than a quarter of the increase in greenhouse gas
emissions. This means that its contribution to the mercury
problem is likely to rise, whether North American producers
do anything to reduce emissions or not.

An increase in
monocultural agriculture-the planting of a single crop
across vast areas-has reduced available habitat for many
songbird species in all parts of the country. In the South,
cotton growing is again on the rise; not only do the huge
quantities of pesticides and herbicides used poison the
birds, but the intensive plowing and flood irrigation also
destroy habitat for the Eastern meadowlark, the bobwhite
quail, the grasshopper sparrow, and other passerines. The
conversion of huge tracts of land to corn production for
ethanol-an intolerable waste of energy on other grounds-has
similar effects in the Midwest. In South and Central
America, the winter destination for many migratory species,
forests and meadows are being cleared for the monocultural
production of such crops as coffee and grain, the latter
mostly to feed cattle. Couple these uses with the housing
developments, industrial sites, and commercial zones that
are taking the place of wildlife habitat to serve another
monoculture-the exploding human population, that is-and the
songbirds have few places left to go.

REPORT: DC MADAM WAS
A CIA FAVORITE

WAYNE MADSEN REPORT There was no mistake
that when Deborah Jeane Palfrey's phone records were made
public by order of US Judge Gladys Kessler, shortly before
she asked to be reassigned from the case, that Palfrey's
Pamela Martin & Associates escort agency had some very
intriguing clientele. If one were to have mapped the phone
numbers on Palfrey's list, McLean, Virginia would have
looked like the epicenter of an earthquake. McLean is the
home to the CIA, Washington's top politicians, and assorted
foreign and domestic business movers and shakers who travel
in and out of the CIA's shadow. . .

As she left her
Orlando condo for her mother's home [shortly before her
alleged suicide], Palfrey was noticed taking a few suitcases
with a white paper file box. Palfrey told the [building]
manager the box contained some important papers, possibly
having to do with her escort business. .

In fact, it is a
certainty that one of the actual "corporate clients" of the
PMA agency was the CIA itself. Palfrey's escorts included
college professors, a naval officer, a legal secretary for
one of Washington's top international law firms, essentially
those who would be reliable to pick up needed intelligence
from a designated target. PMA's clients included as many
foreign political and business leaders as American ones. It
was the potential for blackmail and seeking favors that made
PMA, in business for over 13 years, a favorite for the CIA.
No other escort agency in the Washington area provided the
top-level credentials possessed by PMA. For that reason, PMA
was the agency of choice for the CIA. . .

On September 1,
2007, WMR reported: "WMR has learned that on August 31,
Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the indicted Pamela Martin &
Associates proprietor, filed a 'Motion for Pretrial
Conference to Consider Matters Relating to classified
information' under the 'Classified Information Procedures
Act' with the U.S. District Court in Washington, DC. The
purpose of the filing alerts the government that Palfrey's
defense will likely involved the disclosure of evidence and
identities presently deemed 'classified" by the U.S.
government.'"

The CIPA is only invoked in cases when
classified national security information must be revealed.
It is now clear that Palfrey, who never admitted to this
editor any links between her agency and the CIA, was a
contractor for the spy agency. Palfrey's citing of CIPA is
an indication that she signed a non-disclosure agreement
with the CIA stating that she would never reveal classified
information as a result of her special relationship with the
agency unless authorized to do so. Palfrey's non-disclosure
agreement would have resulted in her making no comment to
the press about any relationship. However, it must be stated
that Palfrey always insisted to this editor that it was
quite possible that some of her employees may have had a
relationship with U.S. intelligence but that she would not
necessarily know that to be the case.

Palfrey was never
comfortable with her court-appointed attorney Preston
Burton. Burton once was a partner in the law office of Plato
Cacheris in Washington. Cacheris' name is synonymous in DC
circles with CIA scandals, particularly those dealing in
espionage. Burton's resume of clients is a "Who's Who" of
the past two decades of spy scandals: the CIA's Soviet spy
Aldrich Ames, the FBI's Soviet spy Robert Hanssen, Oliver
North's secretary Fawn Hall, Watergate convicted Attorney
General John Mitchell, and Monica Lewinsky. Burton, himself,
was involved in the defense of Ames, Hanssen, Lewinsky, as
well as Ana Belen Montes, a former Defense Intelligence
Agency analyst convicted of spying for Cuba.

The top CIA
cases involved the US Eastern District of Virginia court in
Alexandria, where Plato Cacheris' brother, James Cacheris,
serves as a senior judge. Known as the "rocket docket,"
Plato and James Cacheris have overseen a number of espionage
cases, including Ames, that saw quick pleas and lifetime
prison sentences. Mention the name Cacheris in Washington,
DC and CIA comes instantly to mind among those who know the
game. Palfrey was obviously aware of the CIA's past use of
"rocket dockets" in Alexandria and Washington and the
"exchange" of emails between U.S. Judge James Robertson,
federal prosecutors William Cowden and Daniel Butler, and
Burton on the weekend before Burton agreed to not call any
defense witnesses and allow the case to be sent directly to
the jury was a sure indication of outside interference in
the case. Robertson, who replaced Kessler after she
requested to be reassigned, promised to reveal the emails to
the public, indicating he was legally required to do so. To
date, to our knowledge, they have not been released. . .

There is another interesting postscript to the Palfrey
case. Palfrey, after deciding to close down PMA and move to
Europe, chose to buy an apartment in the former East Berlin.
This editor discussed this with Palfrey and the consensus
was that, for European prices, there were some good deals on
real estate in eastern Berlin as the former Soviet sector
has lagged behind in improving infrastructure. However, it
was intriguing that Palfrey, who spent her time mostly in
California and Florida, would have known about a good deal
in East Berlin. Or did one of her agency handlers recommend
it as the perfect place to get away from the "game" in
Washington?

WILL CALIFORNIA BAN GAY MARRIAGE BY
CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT?

JOSH GOODMAN, GOVERNING [The] ruling by
the California Supreme Court legalizing gay marriage was
historic. In six months, it could be history.

That's
because California is likely to vote this fall on a
constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Supporters of
the measure submitted 1.1 million signatures to the
Secretary of State (they only needed about 700,000) and are
awaiting confirmation that gay marriage will appear on the
November ballot.

There are some good reasons to think the
amendment will pass. In 2000, Californians gave 61% of the
vote to an initiative to prohibit gay marriage -- that's the
law that the court overturned yesterday. The new proposal is
for a constitutional amendment, while the 2000 vote was on a
mere statute, but voters probably won't think too much about
that distinction.

What's more, gay marriage opponents have
a near-perfect record in these fights. When states'
electorates have voted on constitutional amendments to ban
gay marriage, 26 out of 27 times they have passed. The only
one that didn't was in Arizona, where the amendment also
would have forbidden civil unions and domestic
partnerships.

Of course, conservative states have been
more likely to hold votes on gay marriage than liberal ones.
But some fairly Democratic states, including Oregon,
Wisconsin and Michigan, have approved gay marriage bans.. .
.

That said, there are also good reasons to think the
amendment might fail, allowing gay marriage to
continue.

Since that 2000 vote, sentiment in California
has clearly shifted in favor of gay rights (it's also
shifted nationwide to a greater or lesser extent depending
on the state). Polls conducted in the past few years
typically have shown that half or slightly less than half of
Californians favor gay marriage. However, no one to my
knowledge has conducted a poll this year on the topic.

The
campaign against the amendment will also have bipartisan
support. Most Democratic officeholders favor gay marriage,
which is why the legislature twice sent Republican Gov.
Arnold Schwarzenegger bills to allow same-sex couples to
wed.

Schwarzenegger vetoed those bills (saying he was
deferring to the court), but he has also pledged to oppose
the constitutional ban, deeming it a "total waste of time."
. . .

BIODIVERSITY OF VERTEBRATES DROPPED BY NEARLY A
THIRD IN LAST 35 YEARS

NEW SCIENTIST The latest data on the
global biodiversity of vertebrates shows that it has fallen
by almost one-third in the last 35 years. But experts say it
may still underestimate the effect humans have had on global
species counts. The Living Planet Index follows trends in
nearly 4,000 populations of 1,477 vertebrate species and is
said to reflect the impact humans have on the planet. It is
based on a wide range of population datasets, such as
commercial data on fish stocks and projects such as the
Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring scheme.

New figures
show that between 1970 and 2005, the global LPI has fallen
by 27%. This suggests that the world will fail to meet the
target of reducing the rate of biodiversity loss set by the
2002 Convention on Biological Diversity.

COUNTERINTUITIVE
NEWS: LOW SALT DIETS ASSOCIATED WITH HEART DISEASE

High-salt diets may not increase the
risk of death, contrary to long-held medical beliefs,
according to investigators from the Albert Einstein College
of Medicine of Yeshiva University. They reached their
conclusion after examining dietary intake among a nationally
representative sample of adults in the U.S. The Einstein
researchers actually observed a significantly increased risk
of death from cardiovascular disease associated with lower
sodium diets. . .

After adjusting for known CVD risk
factors, such as smoking, diabetes and blood pressure, the
one-fourth of the sample who reported consuming the lowest
amount of sodium were found to be 80% more likely to die
from CVD compared to the one-fourth of the sample consuming
the highest level of sodium. The risk for death from any
cause appeared 24% greater for those consuming lower salt,
but this latter difference was not quite large enough to
dismiss the role of chance.

ONE IN SEVEN PUBLIC SCHOOLS
DISTRICTS DO STUDENT DRUG TESTS WITHOUT ANY CAUSE

NORML
One in seven public school districts randomly drug tests
their student body, according to survey data published this
month in the American Journal of Public Health. The
percentage is approximately 50 percent higher the total
number of schools that reported performing suspicionless
drug testing five years ago.

Among the schools that employ
random drug testing, 93 percent test student athletes, while
65 percent test students who engage in extracurricular
activities - a practice that was upheld by the Supreme Court
in 2002 in a 5-4 decision.

Twenty-nine percent of school
districts that perform drug testing impose it upon the
entire student body, a practice that extends "beyond current
Supreme Court sanctions."

Last year the American Academy
of Pediatrics Council on School Health resolved, "There is
little evidence of the effectiveness of school-based drug
testing," and warned that students subjected to random
testing programs may experience "an increase in known risk
factors for drug use." The Academy also warned that
school-based drug testing programs could decrease student
involvement in extracurricular activities and undermine
trust between pupils and educators.

MALIKI REFUSES TO JOIN
BUSH & PATREAUS IN CON ABOUT IRAN

GARETH PORTER, ANTI WAR Early this
month, the George W. Bush administration's plan to create a
new crescendo of accusations against Iran for allegedly
smuggling arms to Shiite militias in Iraq encountered not
just one but two setbacks. The government of Prime Minister
Nouri al-Maliki refused to endorse US charges of Iranian
involvement in arms smuggling to the Mahdi Army, and a plan
to show off a huge collection of Iranian arms captured in
and around Karbala had to be called off after it was
discovered that none of the arms were of Iranian origin.

The news media's failure to report that the arms captured
from Shiite militiamen in Karbala did not include a single
Iranian weapon shielded the US military from a much bigger
blow to its anti-Iran strategy.

The Bush administration
and top Iraq commander Gen. David Petraeus had plotted a
sequence of events that would build domestic US political
support for a possible strike against Iran over its
"meddling" in Iraq and especially its alleged export of arms
to Shiite militias.

The plan was keyed to a briefing
document to be prepared by Petraeus on the alleged Iranian
role in arming and training Shiite militias that would be
surfaced publicly after the al-Maliki government had
endorsed it and it used to accuse Iran publicly.

Chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, told
reporters on Apr. 25 that Petraeus was preparing a briefing
to be given "in the next couple of weeks" that would provide
detailed evidence of "just how far Iran is reaching into
Iraq to foment instability." The centerpiece of the Petraeus
document, completed in late April, was the claim that arms
captured in Basra bore 2008 manufacture dates on them.

US
officials also planned to display Iranian weapons captured
in both Basra and Karbala to reporters. That sequence of
media events would fill the airwaves with spectacular news
framing Iran as the culprit in Iraq for several days, aimed
at breaking down Congressional and public resistance to the
idea that Iranian bases supporting the meddling would have
to be attacked.

But events in Iraq diverged from the plan.
On May 4, after an Iraqi delegation had returned from
meetings in Iran, al-Maliki's spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh,
said in a news conference that al-Maliki was forming his own
Cabinet committee to investigate the US claims. "We want to
find tangible information and not information based on
speculation," he said.

Another adviser to al-Maliki,
Haider Abadi, told the Los Angeles Times' Alexandra Zavis
that Iranian officials had given the delegation evidence
disproving the charges. "For us to be impartial, we have to
investigate," Abadi said.

Al-Dabbagh made it clear that
the government considered the US evidence of Iranian
government arms smuggling insufficient. "The proof we have
is weapons which are shown to have been made in Iran,"
al-Dabbagh said in a separate interview with Reuters. "We
want to trace back how they reached [Iraq], who is using
them, where are they getting it."

Senior US military
officials were clearly furious with al-Maliki for
backtracking on the issue. "We were blindsided by this," one
of them told Zavis.

EMINENT DOMAIN IS A CIVIL RIGHTS ISSUE

DAVID T. BEITO & ILYA SOMIN,KANSAS CITY STAR Few policies have done
more to destroy community and opportunity for minorities
than eminent domain. Some 3 to 4 million Americans, most of
them ethnic minorities, have been forcibly displaced from
their homes as a result of urban renewal takings since World
War II.

The fact is that eminent-domain abuse is a crucial
constitutional rights issue. The Alabama Advisory Committee
of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights will hold a public
forum at Birmingham's historic Sixteenth Street Baptist
church to address ongoing property seizures in the state.
The church was not only a center of early civil rights
action, but also, tragically, where four schoolgirls lost
their lives in a bombing in 1963.

Current eminent domain
horror stories in the South and elsewhere are not hard to
find. At this writing, for example, the city of Clarksville,
Tenn., is giving itself authority to seize more than 1,000
homes, businesses and churches and then resell much of the
land to developers. Many who reside there are black, live on
fixed incomes, and own well-maintained Victorian
homes.

Eminent domain has always had an outsized impact on
the constitutional rights of minorities, but most of the
public didn't notice until the U.S. Supreme Court's 2005
ruling in Kelo v. City of New London. In Kelo, the Court
endorsed the power of a local government to forcibly
transfer private property to commercial interests for the
purpose of "economic development."

The Fifth Amendment
requires that such seizures be for a "public use," but that
requirement can be satisfied, the Court ruled, by virtually
any claim of some sort of public benefit. Many charge that
Kelo gives governments a blank check to redistribute land
from the poor and middle class to the wealthy.

Few
protested the Kelo ruling more ardently than the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In an
amicus brief filed in the case, it argued that "the burden
of eminent domain has and will continue to fall
disproportionately upon racial and ethnic minorities, the
elderly, and economically disadvantaged." Unfettered eminent
domain authority, the NAACP concluded, is a "license for
government to coerce individuals on behalf of society's
strongest interests."

Some earlier civil rights champions,
by contrast, often ignored, or worse helped to undermine,
the rights of property owners. Ironically, the same U.S.
Supreme Court which handed down Brown v. Board in 1954 also
issued Berman v. Parker, in which the Court allowed the
District of Columbia to forcibly expel some 5,000 low-income
African-Americans from their homes in order to facilitate
"urban renewal." It was Berman that enabled the massive
urban renewal condemnations of later decades, which many
critics dubbed "Negro removal" because they too tended to
target African-Americans.

Four years ago, the city of
Alabaster, Ala., used "blight" as a pretext to take 400
acres of rural property, much of it owned by low-income
black people, for a new Wal-Mart. Many of the residents had
lived there for generations, and two other Wal-Mart stores
were located less than fifteen miles away. Several of the
landowners, particularly those who lacked political clout
and legal aid, ended up selling out at a discount.

In the
three years since Kelo, 42 states, including Alabama, have
enacted new laws limiting eminent domain power, but many of
the new laws contain loopholes that make them easy to
circumvent. Some 19 states have forbidden takings for
"economic development" but continue to permit the exact same
kinds of condemnations under the guise of alleviating
"blight" - a concept defined so broadly that virtually any
property the government covets can be declared "blighted."
If takings end up becoming a key constitutional rights issue
for minorities in the 21st century, it will be fitting that
the crusade against them begins in Alabama, where their
victims have suffered most greatly.

TWO LAME DUCKS
CELEBRATE IN ISRAEL

DONALD MACINTYRE INDEPENDENT, UK It
doesn't get much cheesier than this. Certainly, not all
Carole King fans will applaud the choice of her "You've Got
a Friend" as the centerpiece of the entertainment provided
for President George Bush last night at an event in
Jerusalem to salute his unswerving support for the Israeli
leadership over the past seven years. . .

On this, his
second, and presumably last, visit to the Holy Land as the
President of the United States, Mr Bush brought with him
some "beautiful presents" for Mr Peres. But as Channel One's
reporter Ayala Hasson tantalizingly explained, the details
could not be disclosed "for security reasons". What could
this mean?

True, the newspaper Yedhiot Ahronot had in the
morning speculated that the US President would mark Israel's
60th by transferring "goodies" negotiated between the two
governments in the preceding weeks, such as "advanced types
of armament, fighter planes, cruise missiles and new radar
systems that will increase the early-warning time for
surface-to-surface missile fire". But you had to hope that
the mysterious gifts he brought to lunch at the Israeli
President's official residence yesterday were a little more,
well, homely.

Unwittingly or not, the choice of the King
song "When you're down and troubled/ And you need a helping
hand/ And nothing, whoa, nothing is going right. . . soon
I'll be there" had a more personal sub-text. For the
President did his best yesterday to "be there" for Israeli
Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, facing what may be his most
serious police investigation yet into past funding he
received from the American businessman Morris Talansky
during his terms as Jerusalem mayor and industry
minister.

Mr Bush, who had told Israeli reporters in
Washington on Monday that Mr Olmert was an "honest guy",
hugged him in greeting after touching down at Ben Gurion
airport yesterday. Mr Olmert was picked up on the
broadcasters' microphones telling the US National Security
Adviser, Stephen Hadley: "Holding on, holding on, don't
worry.". . .

Not all Israeli commentators have been that
impressed. Yedhiot carried a piece by Yitzhak Benhorin
pointing out that Mr Bush's approval rating had a hit a
"nadir" of 31 per cent while Mr Olmert's was as "soft as
pudding". The article was headlined: "A meeting of two lame
ducks."

PALESTINIANS MOURN 60TH ANNIVERSARY OF 'THE
CATASTROPHE'

GUARDIAN, UK While Israelis celebrated
the 60th anniversary of their nation's birth with fireworks
and barbecues, sirens wailed across the Palestinian
territories today in mourning. It was a day of grief for
Palestinians, who refer to the founding of Israel as the
Catastrophe, or al-Nakba.

Thousands took to the streets to
commemorate those exiled or killed in the conflict that
followed the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. More
than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled, their
property was expropriated and they have not been allowed to
return.

Nearly 5 million Palestinians and their
descendants still live in makeshift refugee camps across the
neighbouring region.

President Mahmoud Abbas today spoke
of the "pain and suffering" of the Palestinians. . .

To
mark the anniversary, schools and universities were closed
for the day and people marched to Israeli checkpoints. At
noon, traffic came to a standstill and sirens sounded across
the territories to mark the start of a two-minute
silence.

GREENHOUSE GASES HIGHEST IN AT LEAST 800,000
YEARS

Reuters Greenhouse gases are at higher
levels in the atmosphere than at any time in at least
800,000 years, according to a study of Antarctic ice on
Wednesday that extends evidence that mankind is disrupting
the climate. Carbon dioxide and methane trapped in tiny
bubbles of air in ancient ice down to 3,200 meters (10,500
ft) below the surface of Antarctica add 150,000 years of
data to climate records stretching back 650,000 years from
shallower ice drilling. . . Before the Industrial
Revolution, levels of greenhouse gases were guided mainly by
long-term shifts in the earth's orbit around the sun that
have plunged the planet into ice ages and back again eight
times in the past 800,000 years.

BIDEN SHOWS OBAMA HOW TO
HANDLE BUSH

Politico Sen. Joe Biden, piling on to
Democratic complaints about President Bush's speech in
Israel today:"This is bullshit, this is malarkey. This
is outrageous, for the president of the United States to go
to a foreign country, to sit in the Knesset . . . and make
this kind of ridiculous statement."

Speaking before the
Knesset, Bush said that "some people" believe the United
States "should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if
some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been
wrong all along."

"We have heard this foolish delusion
before," Bush said. "As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in
1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if I could only
have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.' We
have an obligation to call this what it is - the false
comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly
discredited by history.". . .

"He is the guy who has
weakened us," he said. "He has increased the number of
terrorists in the world. It is his policies that have
produced this vulnerability that the U.S. has. It's his
[own] intelligence community [that] has pointed this out,
not me."

Biden noted that Secretary of Defense Robert
Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have both
suggested that the United States ought to find a way to talk
more with its enemies.

"If he thinks this is appeasement,
is he going to come back and fire his own cabinet?" Biden
asked. "Is he going to fire Condi Rice?"

MILITARY
RECRUITMENT OF CHILDREN VIOLATES INTERNATIONAL
AGREEMENT

Jim Lobe Inter Press Service Pressed by
the demands of the "global war on terrorism", the United
States is violating an international protocol that forbids
the recruitment of children under the age of 18 for military
service, according to a new report released by a major civil
rights group that charged that recruitment practices target
children as young as 11 years old.

The 46-page report,
"Soldiers of Misfortune", which was prepared by the American
Civil Liberties Union for submission to the U.N. Committee
on the Rights of the Child, also found that the U.S.
military disproportionately targets poor and minority public
school students.

Military recruiters, according to the
report, use "exaggerated promises of financial rewards for
enlistment, [which] undermines the voluntariness of their
enlistment." In some cases documented by the report,
recruiters used coercion, deception, and even sexual abuse
in order to gain recruits. Perpetrators of such practices
are only very rarely punished, the report found. . .

The
increased aggressiveness of military recruiters is due in
major part, according to the report, to the increased
pressure to meet enlistment quotas caused by ongoing U.S.
military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan to which nearly
200,000 soldiers and marines are currently deployed. . .

The Protocol, which is attached to the Convention on the
Rights of the Child, is designed to protect the rights of
children under 18 who may be recruited by the military and
deployed to war. Among other provisions, the Protocol sets
an absolute minimum age for recruitment of 16 and requires
that all recruitment activities directed at children under
18 be carried out with the consent of the child's parents or
guardian, that any such recruitment be genuinely volunteer,
and the military fully inform the child of the duties
involved in military service and require reliable proof of
age before enlistment.

While the United States is one of
only two countries -- the other being Somalia -- to have
never ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child,
the U.S. Senate ratified the Protocol in 2002, making it
binding under U.S., as well as international, law. Unlike
most other industrialized countries that set their minimum
recruitment age at 18, the Senate decided on 17 as the
absolute minimum for the United States.

Sam Smith,
1996 - The Pentagon has greatly expanded JROTC programs.
In 1995, the American Friends Service Committee found
retired military personnel teaching approximately 310,000
students, ages 14 and up, in about 2200 high schools (with
another 700 on the docket). As the AFSC pointed
out:Public schooling strives to promote respect for
other cultures, critical thinking and basic academic skills
in a safe environment. In contrast, JROTC introduces guns
into the schools, promotes authoritarian values, uses rote
learning methods, and consigns much student time to learning
drill, military history and protocol, which have little
relevance outside the military.

It pays off, though,
for the Pentagon. Although the JROTC denies it is engaged in
recruiting, 45% of all cadets completing the program sign
up, mostly as enlisted personnel. AFSC also found that JROTC
programs are more often found in schools with a high
proportion of non-white students -- now providing 54% of all
cadets -- and in non-affluent schools.And what are these
cadets being taught? Says the report:

A comparison of
the JROTC curriculum and two widely used civilian high
school civics and history textbooks demonstrates that the
JROTC curriculum falls well below accepted pedagogical
standards. Units on citizenship and history are strikingly
different from standard civil texts on these
subjects.For example, . . . the JROTC text portrays
citizenship as being primarily achieved through military
service, provides only a short discussion of civil rights;
and downplays the importance of civilian control of the
military. . . .

In comparison to the civilian history
text, historical events in the JROTC curriculum are
distorted . . History is described as a linear series of
accomplishments by soldiers, while the progress engendered
by regular citizens is marginalized. America's wars are
treated as having been inevitable.

While it claims to
provide leadership training with broad relevance, in fact
the JROTC curriculum defines leadership as respect for
constituted authority and the chain of command, rather than
as critical thinking and democratic consensus-building . . .
Finally, the text encourages the reader to rely uncritically
on the military as a source of self-esteem and
guidance.

Further, at a time that schools are trying
desperately to discourage violence, the JROTC is teaching
students how to kill more effectively. It is also teaching
them -- in a text that addresses the "Indian menace" that
"Fortunately the government policy of pushing the Indians
farther West, then wiping them out, was carried out
successfully. "And just where did the idea come from for
the expansion of military indoctrination in our high
schools? From none other than that very media model of a
major modern general: Colin Powell.

Following the LA
uprising in 1992, writes Steven Stycos in the Providence
Phoenix, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff "proposed a
massive expansion of the program. Powell urged the new units
be targeted to inner-city youth as an alternative to drug
use and gang membership." In New England the number of
students involved nearly tripled.Was Powell seeking
citizen officers to balance the academy-trained military?
Absolutely not. The JROTC students are grunt-fodder.
Besides, while referring to ROTC as "vital to democracy,"
Powell closed 62 college-based ROTC units during this same
period. The inevitable result was that the proportion of
academy-trained officers rose and the role of the
citizen-officer diminished.

HOW MEDIA USE OF NUMBERS PLAYS
THE RACE CARD

Crispin Sartwell, LA Times - American
"political analysis" has become obsessed with
demographics.For example, pundits and pollsters held that
the Democratic contests in Ohio and Pennsylvania between
Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama turned on the vote
of "white working-class men," a constituency seemingly in
thrall to Clinton. Those primaries supposedly showed Obama's
problem for the general election. . .

This kind of
analysis, though it comes in the form of numbers, is both
fundamentally non-empirical and fundamentally
non-explanatory. Take an election, for example, that
finishes 54% to 46% in Clinton's favor. Now say that white
working-class men constitute 12% of the vote, and 10 of
every 12 of them (10% of the overall vote) go for Clinton.
Obviously, white working-class men were the pivot on which
the election turned. If Obama could have broken off half the
vote that went to Clinton, he would have won: He would have
increased his vote by 5% and reduced hers by 5%, and won 51%
to 49%.

But notice that the vote of any like-sized segment
is equally explanatory. If most "soccer moms" or most
"people ages 35 to 44" or most people "with annual incomes
between $50,000 and $70,000" or most "people in the
southeast corner of the state" voted for Clinton, we can say
that had they voted for Obama, he would have won.

So the
assertion that the result turned on the votes of white
working-class men is completely unsupported by the
demographics. It no more turned on that group than on any
other substantial group that supported Clinton. . .

The
way that polling and demographics slice up the population
is, ultimately, a matter of preference; it does not derive
from, but is a presupposition of, the "science." Searching
for segments of the electorate that vote as a bloc,
demographers split the population up into groups they decide
are important or salient. And their decisions don't
necessarily reflect empirical results -- they are more an
index of their own social attitudes, presumptions and
prejudices.

It would be nearly as scientific to rig up any
segment of the population and regard it as decisive:
blue-collar women, black and white, under 35; black men plus
Latino women; left-handed divorcees. . .

When you bring a
set of racial or gender-based categories to the data, the
divisions these attitudes represent will always be confirmed
as the most important divisions in our society. That just
reinforces the problematic divisions that infested the
attitudes of the pollsters in the first place. And then, at
the end of each election, our divisions of race, gender and
class are, in our imaginations, stronger.

The right
response to the notion that "scientific polling" shows that
the election outcome turns on white men or black women or
soccer moms is a shrug of the shoulders and the arch of an
eyebrow.

Sam Smith - Pat Buchanan tried to explain to
Chris Matthews that if white voters in West Virginia were
voting on the basis of ethnicity, so were black voters in
Philadelphia, but the former gets much greater media
attention. Matthews didn't want to hear, perhaps because he
may be planning to run for Senator in Pennsylvania and needs
the black vote, but the point is correct. The media has no
way of knowing from poll results whether choices have been
made out of ethnic prejudice, ethnic loyalty or a totally
unrelated issue. But it doesn't help ethnic relations to
suggest that white voters who don't vote for a black
candidate are prejudiced, while giving black voters voting
for a black candidate a pass. There are, in fact, striking
similarities between prejudice by white conservatives
against blacks and that of white liberals against poor
whites. And it certainly doesn't help to call someone you've
just dubbed a racist a "hillbilly."

BREVITAS

BUSH CRIME
WATCH

The U.S. government has injected hundreds of
foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs
against their will to keep them sedated during the trip back
to their home country, according to medical records,
internal documents and interviews with people who have been
drugged. The government's forced use of antipsychotic drugs,
in people who have no history of mental illness, includes
dozens of cases in which the "pre-flight cocktail," as a
document calls it, had such a potent effect that federal
guards needed a wheelchair to move the slumped deportee onto
an airplane. . . In a Chicago holding cell early one evening
in February 2006, five guards piled on top of a 49-year-old
man who was angry he was going back to Ecuador, according to
a nurse's account in his deportation file. As they pinned
him down so the nurse could punch a needle through his
coveralls into his right buttock, one officer stood over him
menacingly and taunted, "Nighty-night.". . Involuntary
chemical restraint of detainees, unless there is a medical
justification, is a violation of some international human
rights codes. The practice is banned by several countries
where, confidential documents make clear, U.S. escorts have
been unable to inject deportees with extra doses of drugs
during layovers en route to faraway places. Washington Post

OUTLYING
PRECINCTS

A 19-year-old freshman at the University
of Oklahoma was elected mayor Tuesday of Muskogee, a city of
38,000 in the northeastern part of the state. With all
precincts reporting, John Tyler Hammons won with 70 percent
of the vote over former Mayor Hershel Ray McBride, said
Muskogee County Election Board Secretary Bill Bull. "The
public placing their trust in me is the greatest, humbling
and most awesome experience I've ever had in my life," said
Hammons, who is from Muskogee but attends the university in
Norman. . . Hammons, who will be sworn in next week, said he
plans to continue his college education but expects to
transfer to a school closer to Muskogee.. . . Hammons said a
key to his platform that resonated with voters was openness
of government and keeping citizens better informed of city
operations. Seattle Post Intelligencer

The
Clinton campaign was caught unawares by the NARAL
endorsement [of Obama] , which became public as Clinton
advisers were holding a conference call with reporters.
Asked by a reporter on the call for his response, Clinton's
communications director Howard Wolfson said, "'Surprised'
would be my response" and that Clinton's leadership and
advocacy on abortion rights had been "second to none." The
endorsement drew angry reaction from Clinton supporters,
including Ellen R. Malcolm, the president of Emily's List -
a group that raises money to support feminist candidates.
Recalling Clinton's long support for pro-choice issues,
Malcolm decried NARAL's move as "tremendously disrespectful
to Sen. Clinton . . . to not give her the courtesy to finish
the final three weeks of the primary process." Explaining
her group's backing of Obama, Nancy Keenan, the president of
NARAL Pro-Choice America, said in a statement that she
believes Obama is now certain to secure the nomination and
that his differences with McCain on abortion rights and the
selection of judicial nominees "will be a major reason many
voters, especially pro-choice independent and Republican
women, will cross party lines to support Sen. Obama in the
fall." Mcclatchy

Republican presidential candidate John
McCain said on Thursday that, if elected, he would like to
take a page from the British government and appear in
question-and-answer sessions with lawmakers. "I will ask
Congress to grant me the privilege of coming before both
houses to take questions, and address criticism, much the
same as the prime minister of Great Britain appears
regularly before the House of Commons," McCain said in
excerpts of a speech he is to deliver later in Columbus,
Ohio. ReutersRalph Nader, who still uses a manual
Underwood typewriter, showed up at Google headquarters where
he took questions for about an hour and did a YouTube interview

Alan Keyes, who was
recently beaten 3-to-1 for the Constitution Party nomination
for President, has decided to continue his run for President
as an independent. Keyes is trying to start a new party
called America's Independent Party. He has groupings of
supporters in Texas, California, Florida, New York and
Missouri. In what was their first major ballot-access
hurdle, the Keyes campaign has failed to get on the ballot
in Texas-collecting only 10,000 signatures. Third Party News

Researchers at the University of Virginia
found that if you're a member of one of the geeky "out
groups" in high school surrounded by jocks, prom queens and
cheerleaders, simply being comfortable with yourself and
your peers -- no matter how nerdy others might think you are
-- may go a long way in ensuring a successful social life in
the future. The new findings, published today in the journal
Child Development, suggest that how a teenager feels about
himself or herself is the best indicator of future social
functioning ABC News

CORPORADOS

"Prozac Nation:
Revisited," a show that aired on National Public Radio
member stations, "featured four prestigious medical experts
discussing the controversial link between antidepressants
and suicide. .. All four said that worries ... have been
overblown." But the show did not disclose that all four
"have financial ties to the makers of antidepressants," or
that the series that produced the show, "The Infinite Mind,"
has received "unrestricted grants" from drug companies
including Eli Lilly, the maker of Prozac. One guest, Peter
Pitts, heads the industry-funded Center for Medicine in the
Public Interest and is "senior vice president for global
health affairs at the PR firm Manning Selvage & Lee," which
counts among its clients Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer
and "more than a dozen other pharmaceutical
companies

Low doses of cannabis and alcohol
have contrasting effects upon psychomotor performance,
according to clinical trial data published in the current
issue of the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention.
Investigators at Hebrew University and the University of the
Negev in Israel assessed the impact of alcohol and THC on
simulated driving performance in fourteen subjects. . .
"Average speed was the most sensitive driving performance
variable affected by both THC and alcohol but with an
opposite effect," authors wrote. "Smoking THC cigarettes
caused drivers to drive slower in a dose-dependent manner,
while alcohol caused drivers to drive significantly faster
than in ‘control' conditions." Both alcohol and low doses
of cannabis impaired drivers' ability to maintain lane
position and significantly increased subjects' reaction
time. Neither low doses of alcohol nor THC significantly
increased subjects' total number of collisions. . . Two
recent examinations of fatal accident crash data indicate
that alcohol, even at low doses, greatly increases drivers'
crash risk compared to cannabis. A 2007 case-control study
published in the Canadian Journal of Public Health reported
that US drivers with blood alcohol levels of 0.05 percent
were three times as likely to have engaged in unsafe driving
activities prior to a fatal crash as compared to individuals
who tested positive for marijuana. Similarly, a 2005 review
of French auto accident data reported that drivers who
tested positive for any amount of alcohol had a four times
greater risk of having a fatal accident than did drivers who
tested positive for marijuana in their blood.

MONEY &
WORK

In an age where governments of every
political stripe distort economic data to promote their own
self-interests, it's hardly surprising that they present
inflation statistics that are wildly at odds with the
reality faced by consumers and businesses, and regarded with
utter disbelief. In the latest US government report on
inflation for instance, there was a glaring "seasonal
adjustment," for energy prices that cast great doubt as to
the accuracy of the findings. US Labor Dept apparatchiks
said consumer prices rose a smaller than expected 0.2% in
April, tamed by energy prices, which were unchanged last
month. Utilizing an obscure "seasonal adjustment," Labor
figured that gasoline prices actually fell 2% in April,
which doesn't reflect the reality of what consumers were
paying at the pump. Furthermore, the IMF's global food price
index rose 43% over the last 12-months, but the US consumer
price index for food is only 5.1% higher. Gary Dorsch, Financial Sense

WRITTEN
WORDS

A publishing institution, faithfully mailed at least
twice a year to thousands of stores and libraries for about
as long as the industry has existed, may be on its way out:
The paper catalog. Harper Collins announced that it was
planning to make their listings of upcoming releases
available only online, calling the current system both
economically and environmentally indefensible. . . Other
major publishers are moving in a similar direction,
including Penguin Group (USA) and Random House Inc. - AP

Officially, Authonomy is a "social
network for writers and book-lovers alike". Just as MySpace
allowed bands to succeed without the prior approval and
investment of record companies, so Authonomy will
theoretically help separate the unpublished wheat from the
chaff. The idea is that aspirant scribes can upload up to
10,000 words to the site and then have their masterworks
judged by what HarperCollins refers to as "keen,
talent-spotting readers" - other people, that is, who have
registered on the network. No longer will the
disgruntled writing masses be able to complain that their
work has not been published because it has been vetoed by
elite, snobbish publishing industry professionals. Now they
will be kyboshing each other. (Or launching each other's
careers.) . . . I imagine that the hearts of those behind
Authonomy are in the right place, but it's hard to ignore
the suspicion that what they are really doing is outsourcing
the unlovely task of sluicing through the slush pile. . . .
I think Authonomy may end up being a nice polite way for the
publishers to say that they're not accepting unsolicited
submissions anymore. If the launch goes well, I'd wager that
anyone asking about submissions will be directed to hit the
site, keeping editors' (and editorial assistants') desks
clear for them to get on with the books agents have sent
them, the ones they are genuinely interested in. - Guardian

Bookstore sales rose 1.3% in
March, to $1.03 billion, according to estimates from the
U.S. Census Bureau. Sales have increased every month so far
in 2008 and finished the first quarter up 5.1%, to $4.46
billion. The 1.3% March increase was the smallest gain in
2008. Publishers Weekly

Pinal County Sheriff
Chris Vasquez has plagiarized more than a dozen times in his
monthly letters since taking office three years ago, lifting
text from numerous Web sites, journalists, lawmakers and
even President Bush. The plagiarism is extensive. And in
many cases, the text is copied verbatim and unattributed
with copied material that ranges in size from a few
sentences to entire speeches. Vasquez admitted that he
directly "copies and pastes" material from outside sources
into many of his letters without attribution. He added that
he doesn't think it's wrong. "You can call it plagiarism if
you want," Vasquez said. "I'm just providing a public
service." The letters are distributed to newspapers across
the county that print them each month. They also were posted
on Vasquez's campaign Web site. However, they were removed
Wednesday afternoon after the Tribune inquired about them.
David Biscobing, East Valley Tribune, Az

In Uganda, which has one of the lowest
levels of electricity in Africa, Motorola has launched an
initiative to provide solar cell phone recharging stations
that can be run by local, entrepreneurial women. Each kiosk
is charged by a 55-watt inverted solar panel and can charge
up to 20 phones at a time. The women who run the kiosks,
meanwhile, are also equipped to sell handsets and operator
SIM cards and to provide repair services. For local people
without their own phones, the kiosks effectively function as
a local "phone booth" for making occasional calls as
well.

Polar bears were listed on Wednesday as threatened
under the U.S. Endangered Species Act because their sea ice
habitat is melting away. But the new protection was not
accompanied by any proposals to address either climate
change, which environmentalists say causes the deterioration
of the bears' habitat, or drilling in the Arctic for the
fossil fuels that spur the climate-warming greenhouse
effect. In announcing the government's decision one day
before a court-ordered deadline, Interior Secretary Dirk
Kempthorne acknowledged that human-caused greenhouse gas
emissions contributed to the global warming damaging the
polar bears' habitat. "While the legal standards under the
Endangered Species Act compel me to list the polar bear as
threatened, I want to make clear that this listing will not
stop global climate change or prevent any sea ice from
melting," he said at a briefing. Reuters

Climate change will lead to a
"fortress world" in which the rich lock themselves away in
gated communities and the poor must fend for themselves in
shattered environments, unless governments act quickly to
curb greenhouse gas emissions, according to the
vice-president of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change. Prof Mohan Munasinghe was giving a lecture at
Cambridge university in which he presented a dystopic
possible future world in which social problems are made much
worse by the environmental consequences of rising greenhouse
gas emissions. . . The scenario, which he termed
"barbarisation" was already beginning to happen, he said.
"Fortress world is a situation where the rich live in
enclaves, protected, and the poor live outside in
unsustainable conditions. "If you see what is going on in
some of the gated communities in some countries you do find
that rich people live in those kind of protected
environments. If you see the restrictions on international
travel you see the beginnings of the fortress world syndrome
even in entering and leaving countries," he said. Guardian, UK

FREEDOM BEAT

A divided federal appeals court panel
has upheld a Nevada school district's dress code, issuing a
ruling that an ACLU attorney says seeks to "eviscerate" a
seminal Supreme Court opinion protecting student speech. In
2003, the Clark County School District adopted a standard
dress code for all county students. It also established a
means for individual schools to create more-restrictive
uniform policies. Many schools in the district adopted such
uniform policies.

SCIENCE & HEALTH

Writing in the International Journal of
Liability and Scientific Enquiry, Patrick Kierkegaard of
the University of Essex, England, suggests that there is
scant scientific evidence that video games are anything but
harmless and do not lead to real world aggression. Moreover,
his research shows that previous work is biased towards the
opposite conclusion. . . Kierkegaard studied a range of
research papers, several of which have concluded since the
early 1980s that video games can lead to juvenile
delinquency, fighting at school and during free play
periods, and violent criminal behavior. Evidence from brain
scans carried out while gamers play also seem to support a
connection between playing video games and activation of
regions of the brain associated with aggression. However,
Kierkegaard explains, there is no obvious link between
real-world violence statistics and the advent of video
games. Despite several high profile incidents in US academic
institutions, "Violent crime, particularly among the young,
has decreased dramatically since the early 1990s," says
Kierkegaard, "while video games have steadily increased in
popularity and use. For example, in 2005, there were
1,360,088 violent crimes reported in the USA compared with
1,423,677 the year before. "With millions of sales of
violent games, the world should be seeing an epidemic of
violence," he says, "Instead, violence has declined."
Research is inconclusive, emphasises Kierkegaard. It is
possible that certain types of video game could affect
emotions, views, behaviour, and attitudes, however, so can
books, which can lead to violent behaviour on those already
predisposed to violence.

INDICATORS

For nearly three in
10 households, don't even bother trying to call them on a
landline phone. They either only have a cell phone or seldom
if ever take calls on their traditional phone. The federal
figures, showed that reliance on cells is continuing to rise
at the expense of wired telephones. In the second half of
last year, 16 percent of households only had cell phones,
while 13 percent also had landlines but got all or nearly
all their calls on their cells. The survey also found that:
Low-income people are likelier than the more affluent to
have only cell phones.. . . Those with only cells tend to be
living with unrelated roommates, renters rather than
homeowners, and Hispanics and blacks rather than whites. . .
About a third of those under age 30 only have cell phones Chicago Tribune

FIELD NOTES

Frank
Schaeffer's memoir, Crazy for God, offers an unexpected
mirror into the American experience. From being one of the
brains behind the founding of the evangelical political
right, to his stalwart, enthusiastic support for Obama
today, Schaeffer's trajectory has taken him through various
stations of faith. Strong character having been bred into
him, he's managed eventually to come to terms with it all.
An example of personal resiliency by a brilliant writer. PODCAST

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